I am a historian of disease and environment in twentieth and twenty-first century Africa. My work so far, grounded in an interdisciplinary approach, has been on projects related to sleeping sickness, malaria, and Covid-19 and the way they illuminate the complexities of local and international agency. My doctoral thesis, which I did with the University of Oxford between 2018 and 2024 investigates the multi-layered relationships between population movements and African experiences of disease and environment in colonial northwest Zimbabwe. Drawing on extensive field research, I make two inter-locking arguments. First, in addition to the more common focus on exchanges between state officials and Africans, which is basically cast as a top- down disciplinary project, I argue that ‘African-African’ interactions were central in producing and reproducing unique knowledge systems. Whilst the colonial state made aggressive interventions into the management of African environment and disease, control of tsetse and mosquitoes, such interventions were variably engaged with, co-opted, and subverted by African populations with different and often clashing ideas about disease. The result was the simultaneous making and remaking of social identities and shifting relations with political authority. Second, I push the consideration of colonial interventions beyond a state concern for ‘ordering diseased’ African spaces through laboratory-like experiments. Using Gokwe as an example, I argue that colonial interventions were elusive, fluid, and abstract force that suffered from external modifications and abuses. Of note here were the counterinsurgency campaigns of the Rhodesian forces in which biological agents were used against guerrillas travelling through Gokwe from Zambia thus introducing radically new experiences and meanings of disease and environment.
My proposed research seeks to investigate the imbrication between the state— which persisted through colonialism (and, later hierarchy)—and diverse local epistemologies of disease—which formed a source where labour force to implement and enforce malaria interventions was drawn from. By exploring scientific malaria interventions and local ideas of malaria, we see constant interactions and remaking of disease at distinct levels. I seek to make a case that exploring the agency of state intervention, as framed by both global and local experts, was complicated and remade, with significant consequences. Second, mosquito governance criticises the authenticity of scientific malaria knowledge.